When tax scams were in-wall, not offshore

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Georgian window-blockers were the Jimmy Carrs of their day — only more visible

When you use the term “daylight robbery” you are invoking a 17th-century British tax and a tax avoidance scheme still visible in many parts of Britain. In 1697 Parliament introduced a tax on windows to defray the expense of the new mint. Householders would henceforth pay a tax proportional to the number of windows they owned.

The window tax was intended to be progressive. Individuals with large houses would logically pay most and, as windows were visible from the outside, calculating the return should have been easy. It proved to be very difficult. Middle-class and wealthy homeowners simply boarded up